Posts Tagged ‘Texas Transportation Institute’

The Texas A&M Transportation Institute Policy Center looks at the (first) three bills relating to ridesharing that have been filed in the Lege: Three bills have been filed so far in the 85th Texas Legislature, regular session, addressing transportation network companies, frequently referred to as ride-hailing or (less accurately) as ridesharing. The bills are SB […]

Well, they’re coming, ready or not. Researchers, business leaders and elected officials are about to turn Texas into the biggest laboratory for connected cars in the nation, with the likeliest place to spot a self-driving car in Houston along the high occupancy vehicle and toll lanes along some of the region’s busiest freeways. Officials are […]

It is what it is. Cheap gasoline has Texans driving more, indicating that efforts to promote mass transit or bicycle commuting are falling short, a new statewide poll suggests. As folks hit the road, though, they are increasingly supportive of investment in transit and bike safety, even if perhaps they’d rather see others try it […]

The Texas Legislature would like to know. As Texas lawmakers consider filing legislation next year related to ride-hailing companies, they learned Tuesday that more than 30 states have passed laws calling for some level of regulation of companies like Uber and Lyft. A report presented by Texas A&M University’s Transportation Institute analyzed state and municipal […]

It’s getting worse. Houston-area leaders love to trumpet the region’s affordable cost of living and low taxes, but the costs of sitting in traffic are taking a record share of workers’ incomes, according to a comprehensive annual study. The average peak-period commuter in Houston pays $1,490 annually in lost time and wasted fuel because freeways […]

Someone did a study to try to answer that question. In the Austin area, more than 220,000 vehicles travel on I-35 on a daily basis. In contrast, SH 130, the tolled bypass around Austin only carries 40,000 vehicles daily. Why do more vehicles choose the I-35 route? What would make travelers, particularly big trucks, more […]

I know, I’m as shocked as you are. It’s a common dilemma for Houston motorists. Congestion in Houston increased sharply from 2013 to 2014, according to a report released Tuesday by TomTom, developer of the mapping and traffic data fed to phones and other GPS devices. Analysts said trips in the region on average last […]

Can we wait until we’ve had at least one non-holiday work week before we start talking about North Line ridership numbers? Thanks. The changes brought by the rail line, an extension of the Main Street Line now known as the Red Line, might develop more gradually than some residents and businesses hope. Early signs are […]

Two things that aren’t mentioned in this story but need to be. Two adjoining stretches of U.S. 59 in downtown and west Houston fared the worst regionally on an annual list of the 100-most congested freeways in the state, compiled by Texas Department of Transportation and Texas A&M Transportation Institute officials. [David] Schrank, a co-author […]

We love this sort of thing, don’t we? Houston commuters continue to endure some of the worst traffic delays in the country, according to the 2012 Urban Mobility Report released Tuesday by the Texas A&M Transportation Commission. Area drivers wasted more than two days a year, on average, in traffic congestion, costing them each $1,090 […]

No doubt that traffic on the Katy Freeway moves a lot more smoothly now than it used to. But there’s a lot more to the question of whether the $2.8 billion that was spent to widen it was a good investment or not. Four years after the project was completed, a comparative analysis of drive-time […]

You have perhaps heard the news that Google’s driverless car has been approved for street usage in California; specifically, California Governor Jerry Brown has signed a bill that requires the California Department of Motor Vehicles to draft regulations for autonomous vehicles by Jan. 1, 2015. You may be wondering, with varying degrees of wonder or […]

I’m sure you will be completely unsurprised to hear that I-10 has bad traffic congestion. You may be surprised to hear where the worst of it is, however. Just in time for Thanksgiving travel, a new study has found that a stretch of Interstate 10 through Houston is one of the nation’s most congested highways. […]

I’m more interested in the methodology used to determine the list of Texas’ most congested roads than I am in the roads themselves, since most of us could have named the roads on that list without doing any work. Like the Dallas freeway, many of the roads on the list aren’t a surprise. But TxDOT […]

Last week, when I wrote about the anti-red light camera folks turning in their petition signatures, I noted that the Chron story referenced an update to the January 2009 study about the effect of cameras on the collision rate at the monitored intersections. That study reported an overall increase in collisions at all intersections, whether […]

For all the talk about the need to raise the gas tax in Texas to meet our transportation needs, there is another possible way to do it, which is now under study: The vehicle miles tax. The Texas Transportation Commission has directed a fresh study of the idea, and it is not alone. There are […]

So says a study commissioned by the city. Houston’s mandatory towing program has continued to reduce crashes on the city’s freeways, according to a city-commissioned study released Monday. The study examined the effect of the Safe Clear program from 2005 through 2008. It found there were 120 fewer accidents per month, on average, compared to […]

Good news is always welcome. A new report by the Texas Transportation Institute found that the state’s rate of fatal teen crashes is dropping faster here than anywhere. Researchers looked at 37 states that put restrictions on teen drivers’ licenses and found Texas is alone in seeing the number of teen drivers involved in fatal […]

This is not a surprise, but it is a missed opportunity. Two-thirds of the country lives in large metropolitan areas, home to the nation’s worst traffic jams and some of its oldest roads and bridges. But cities and their surrounding regions are getting far less than two-thirds of federal transportation stimulus money. According to an […]

Traffic congestion hasn’t gotten any better. Rising gasoline prices in the last half of 2007 produced less traffic, according to an annual study by researchers at Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation Institute. The typical urban commuter spent one less hour stuck in traffic that year, and wasted one less gallon of gasoline than the year […]

I’m basically agnostic about the plan to convert HOV lanes to HOV-plus-toll lanes that Metro is floating. Like Christof, who was quoted in the story, I don’t think it will make that much difference in terms of actual traffic flow, though I think that Texas Transportation Institute fellow is correct to note that it will […]

News flash: Travel times on the newly-expanded Katy Freeway have improved. The expansion of 23 miles of roadway along the Katy was completed in October. The $2.8 billion project took five years to complete and added 18 lanes between the Loop and Texas 6. Each direction has four main lanes, three frontage road lanes and […]